


Bad News Is Coming

by HarpiaHarpyja



Series: A Song of Trash and Fire [17]
Category: Star Wars - All Media Types, Star Wars Sequel Trilogy
Genre: Alternate Universe - College/University, Alternate Universe - Modern Setting, Alternate Universe - Roommates/Housemates, Backstory, Ben Needs to Pack on Mass, Ben POV, Ben is a Relucantly Good Comfort-er, Developing Friendships, F/M, Fluff and Angst, It's Just Science, Male-Female Friendship, Money Troubles, angry rey, reylo freeform
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-10-26
Updated: 2018-10-26
Packaged: 2019-08-08 02:42:25
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,431
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/16420844
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/HarpiaHarpyja/pseuds/HarpiaHarpyja
Summary: Ben arrives home from a long day of studying and his latest bullshit job and is surprised to find Rey missing from her favorite spot on the couch. When he hears her raging in her room, he decides to try to find out what's wrong—and may or may not immediately regret it.(A backstory companion ficlet for 'A Song of Trash and Fire: Ben and Rey Make a Porno', taking place in December 2010, eight years before the main fic begins.)





	Bad News Is Coming

**Author's Note:**

> Wherein, Rey needs to drop out of college, and Ben decides to be a good friend.

He should have known by how quiet the living room was that something was wrong. It was a Sunday night, so Rey wouldn’t have work, which generally meant that she could be found camped out on the couch in her pajamas, watching Netflix and stuffing her face with either popcorn or some weird off-brand Dorito chips she’d recently become obsessed with. It was probably her favorite “luxury,” getting to be wantonly lazy one night a week, and he tried not to ruin it by bothering her. 

But tonight, as he entered their apartment and began clumsily tugging his slush-covered boots off just inside the door, he glanced across the room and found the couch empty. The television was turned off. The kitchen light wasn’t on. The whole room was devoid of any signs that she was home at all. It occurred to him that she might have gone out somewhere, but Rey wasn’t really one to go out much on a weeknight, not if she had classes or work the next day. No judgment there—neither was he.

Well, it was certainly strange, but hey, if she’d made plans or was out running errands, good for her. He’d had the car that night, so she couldn’t have gone far. She’d be back soon. Maybe she was at Tosche Station and would bring him back some late-dinner waffles. Finals were coming up and he’d been studying a lot (in theory) and working on several papers, which meant he’d been losing track of time and missing campus cafeteria hours almost daily for the last week. Surviving on caffeine and sheer wit _sounded_ appealing and sort of romantic, except it mostly just left him drained of the will to live by day’s end. He was close to that point now.

So he lingered in the kitchen and did a quick fridge raid, turning up with a few slices of pizza from Friday night and the last bottle of Yards Brawler left over from his twenty-first birthday before heading back toward his bedroom. He’d change and maybe get back to _Mass Effect 2_ a while, wait and see if Rey brought him some more to eat. According to those fitness websites, he was going to have to do better than a few measly slices of pizza if he was going to start packing on mass.

But as he walked past her bedroom on the way to his, he noticed the light leaking from beneath her door and paused. A moment later Ben heard a muffled choking noise, followed by what was absolutely a nose being violently blown, then something hitting the floor and breaking a few seconds later.

“ _FUCK_!”

Okay, so Rey was definitely home, and she was . . . really pissed about something. 

Ben weighed his options. He could pretend he hadn’t noticed and continue on to his room, change out of his work clothes, and wait for Rey to come out. Or he could knock and see if she was all right. He was still trying to decide what to do when another choked sob sounded from behind her door, and he realized there really wasn’t a decision to make at all. He couldn’t just leave her in there without checking to see if she needed anything. If it annoyed her, well, it would be a learning experience.

He had the decency to knock, and there was a long, awkward pause. He wasn’t sure she’d heard him, though it seemed difficult to believe she hadn’t. Maybe she didn’t want to be bothered after all. Ben began to continue on to his room, but then Rey’s door creaked open.

“Ben?” It didn’t even sound like her voice. It was all tiny and strained and thick. She sounded sick. 

He halted and turned back to her. She had opened the door only enough to poke her head out, and she _looked_ sick, holy shit. Her eyes were all swollen, and her nose was bright red, her mouth chapped, her face wet—he thought she was sweating at first, but then realized it was tears. And probably snot, to be honest.

“Christ, Rey, are you okay?” 

He started toward her, and she backed into her room and opened the door to let him in. Her room was slightly smaller than his, which she’d claimed she preferred because she had less things than he did. Usually, she kept it quite tidy. But tonight her bed was a mess of tangled sheets and her quilt was bunched up against the wall. There was a half-folded pile of laundry on the floor outside her closet. In front of her nightstand, a puddle of water had spread on the floor, studded with shards of broken blue glass. There was a fallen box of tissues sitting in the middle of the puddle as well.

“Rey . . .?”

She brushed past him and practically threw herself onto the floor near the puddle, then started gathering the bigger pieces of glass in her hands, muttering to herself. “Knocked the bloody . . . fucking . . . I just needed to . . . complete failure . . . can’t even grab a tissue without fucking it up.” 

Frowning, Ben put his plate and beer down on her desk. She was still shaking and sniffling and gathering when he drew up beside her and crouched down. “Hey, can you . . . slow down a second? You’re going to cut yourself. Hey, Rey. _Stop_.”

“Don’t tell me what to do!” she snarled. 

She shoved him hard in the shoulder, and he was so surprised by it that he almost lost his balance and fell on his ass. She was up on her feet already and storming off toward her little trash can, where she dumped the glass, then stormed back to her bed and threw herself down on it. 

Ben watched it all with a frozen look of alarm. He was fairly positive he had never seen Rey this upset since sometime in high school, when he had no doubt been the cause of it. He tried to focus on finishing the clean-up job of the floor, getting the rest of the glass sorted, and was casting around for a towel when he heard her start to sob again.

Jesus Christ. What the fuck was going on?

Half prepared for her to hit him again—for no reason that he could fathom—Ben sat on the edge of her bed and looked down at her. She was curled up in a ball with her quilt pulled up nearly over her head, quivering with suppressed cries, her face pressed into her pillows. He tentatively rested a hand on what he assumed was her shoulder. It stilled her a tiny bit, and she didn’t try to kick or hit him, so that seemed like a good sign.

“What’s wrong?”

She mumbled something into her pillow, and while he could detect the bitterness in her voice, her words were utterly lost. 

“Uh . . .”

Abruptly, she shoved the quilt down and twisted her neck around to look up at him. Her face was wet and blotchy again, and Ben wished her tissues weren’t currently soaking in the water she’d spilled. 

“They— I—” She was barely holding it together. He watched another tear track down her face to bead at the tip of her chin. “I lost it. I lost my scholarship. It’s gone. I— I’m not—”

The meaning of what she was saying dawned on him slowly. Rey had been attending Drexel on a generous scholarship. She’d never divulged exactly _how_ generous it was, but it was enough that she absolutely depended on it to be able to afford her education there. He knew she’d been struggling the last few semesters to keep her head above water between her two jobs and studying and trying to have an actual life somewhere in there for good measure. But she’d been doing that essentially for the last eight years. Everyone cracked eventually. 

And that was doing Rey a massive disservice. She hadn’t cracked. She was brilliant, and impossibly hard-working, and resilient, and deserved to have all the best. Life just . . . never seemed to care about what people deserved. Ben felt a surge of anger, directed at nothing in particular—Rey’s shitty luck in life, her university’s financial aid department, whichever of her professors had given her low enough marks to see her begin to slip, her jobs for not paying her enough but also for loading her with too many hours for her to catch a breath. 

All of that was useless, of course, but he couldn’t help it. She was sitting there literally wracked with sobs, and the only thing he could think of was to get angry for her; as if she wasn’t already angry enough for herself.

Ben held his breath for a few seconds until he felt a bit more centered—And what the fuck was _he_ getting so upset about? He hadn’t just lost a scholarship.—and tried something that, he assumed, was a more productive method of addressing the issue.

“There’s got to be something you can do instead. Right?” He took his hand back and cast around for a tissue substitute. Nothing.

Rey shook her head and pushed herself to sit up, but even then she was still kind of folded over herself. “No. Or I thought so too, and I checked, but no. I can’t take out more loans, I won’t be able to handle them after . . .”

“What about—”

“ _Ben_. Stop. I said there fucking isn’t. Don’t you think I’d have tried everything?” Her hands were balled in fists and she was shaking. “Look, I don’t have a . . . a family, with money, and political connections, and— and— nice _things_ , okay? I can’t just _figure something out_ because I want there to be a way. There isn’t. This was it. I can’t go back next semester.”

He tried not to feel offended by her implication that he was somehow surfing on his parents’ generosity. She knew he wasn’t. He’d refused to let them pay for school, even after they’d insisted; maybe it was more an issue of pride and desire to distance himself from them than something nobler like responsibility, but he was putting himself through school. Not them. Still, saying that to Rey would be the height of privilege, and yeah, he _was_ privileged, especially compared to her, so he didn’t.

“I just . . .” he began, trailing when it occurred to him that nothing he wanted to say was coming out right. “I’m trying to help you feel better.”

“Well. Don’t.” She was staring at the wall across the room, her lip trembling. “Oh _shit_ , I’m going to lose my work study at the library too.” 

Another paycheck, gone, was what she meant. Probably a third of what she brought in between it and her waitressing gig. Ben winced, and a moment later she was breaking down again and falling into him and he couldn’t do anything but catch her.

“Hey.” He said it quietly, and had no idea why, because he had nothing to say. 

Anyway, she probably hadn’t even heard him. She was neither a pretty nor quiet crier, he was finding out. It was . . . fine. At least she wasn’t hitting him, even if it seemed like she wasn’t going anywhere any time soon. So he drew his arms around her and let her lean awkwardly into his chest. He could already feel tears soaking into his T-shirt, and probably grosser stuff, though he didn’t really mind. He was not much of a hugger, at all, but at the moment it seemed to be what she needed. A solid body to curl into (though he’d be lying if this wasn’t making him very aware of the fact that his body could be a whole lot more solid). He just felt so shitty for her right now. This was not fucking fair.

“This isn’t fucking fair,” he said after a few minutes had passed and she began to grow quiet and still. “To you. It sucks. I’m really sorry, Rey.”

“Yeah. Well. Fuck it, right?” 

_That_ did not sound like Rey at all, but he tried not to take it too seriously. There was no way she was thinking clearly right now.

She sniffled loudly and gulped, her face still buried halfway between his shoulder and chest, her arms still clutching around his middle. Her head turned a little and she looked around the room, her grip on him slackening just enough that he felt like he could relax. “Did you have pizza when you came in here?”

“....What?”

“Pizza. You had pizza.”

“Oh. Yeah.” He glanced at where he’d left his plate and beer when he’d come in. He’d completely forgotten them both. “Do you . . want it?”

She was quiet for a few seconds, then said in a small voice, “Yes. Please?”

“Yeah. Sure. Go for it.” 

He waited for her to let go of him, squeezed her shoulder for good measure, then went to retrieve the pizza. As she tore into the first slice, still a mess and now actually a little scary to behold, Ben finished cleaning up the puddle, and the ruined tissues and smaller bits of broken glassware. That done, and beer in hand, he was still hungry; Rey had just finished his dinner.

Shifting from foot to foot a bit, he asked, “Hey, you wanna go take a walk over to Tosche? I haven’t had dinner”—or lunch—“and I’d probably commit murder for a burger right now. Or some waffles. If you’re still hungry, I’ll treat.”

“Is this some pity thing?”

“What? No. Jesus. Just . . . you’ve had a shitty fucking day. And you’re my friend, so I think something should go your way today even if it’s just some diner food.” As an afterthought, he added, “Unless you’re not hungry or you just want to be alone. I know you probably need to . . . do stuff.”

She was rubbing at her eyes with the corner of her quilt and drying her face. “I’m sorry. You’re right.” Rey smiled weakly, and she still looked like she’d been through a wringer, but the smile was real, and he couldn’t help offering one back. “Let me just go wash my face. I don’t want anyone to see me like this.”

“I saw you like this,” he pointed out, venturing to tease her and hoping it wouldn’t piss her off. Usually it didn’t, but tonight was beyond not normal.

She looked at him over her shoulder and shrugged. “Oh, you don’t count. You’re . . . you.” 

With a resigned wave, Rey slipped out into the hall to go make herself presentable.


End file.
